On Tuesday, January 12 2012, Herman Bruyninckx, Professor at K.U.Leuven and Coordinator of EURON, visited PAL robotics to give a talk on recent developments of the BRICS project.

The talk topic was about the BRICS Component Model, an effort to identify best practices that can bring structure into software development in robotics, and reduce the complexity of integrating large-scale robotic systems. The core paradigms behind this model are Model-Driven-Engineering (MDE) meta-modeling and the 5C’s:

Coordination
Configuration
Computation
Communication
Composition

We at PAL Robotics will be following this effort closely, with an eye on how it can benefit the industry and academia alike.

This year PAL Robotics participated for the first time at the Global Shopping Centre Convention of the Middle East and North Africa, which took place on 28 and 29of November at the Dubai World Trade Center.  People from all aspects of the sector were present, from holding CEO’s, to Shopping Mall managers, Retail brand representatives, and event organizers, mostly from the United Arab Emirates and from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Our robot REEM showed people how to find the way through the premises, how to retrieve all kinds of information through its Dynamic Information System, it gave a demonstration of Fairy tale-telling (f.i. for the kids at the Family Entertainment Centers) and for the first time was also able to demonstrate how advertisement could be used in a dynamic way, that is, making the advertisement change in function of its environment.

REEM brought a fresh breeze of innovation to the event and people really loved to watch the humanoid service robot going around and were hoping to see one soon at their own Shopping Malls. Well, who knows…??

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Friday December 2 2011, PAL Robotics opened it’s doors at 9:00am for the first group of robotics fans! During the day we had 6 groups visiting, about 80 people in total on our premises, and the event was a big success!!

We would like to thank the main organisation of the European Robotics Week, our company will definitely participate again next year!

Here some comments of our participants:

Alex: “Referente al openday, agradeceros la oportunidad de conocer vuestra actividad. Nos sentimos muy bien atendidos por Jorien, Oriol y los otros ingenieros. También fue interesante conocer las criaturas de PAL Robotics, así cómo algunas curiosisdades y funciones.”

Albert: “I would like to highlight two things concerning the Open Day visit of last Friday:
First, I got in contact with an innovative sector that seems to deserve a great future in the field development of humanoid robots. And secondly, I saw a very dynamic company dedicated to the innovation in order to improve welfare of society.
It was a pity I couldn’t come with my younger son. He would have really enjoyed the two robot demostrations!”

REEM assisted to the 78^th Annual Congress of UFI, the Global Association of the Exhibition Industry on November 10^th and 11^th in Valencia, Spain. REEM welcomed all participants of the event and showed its interaction capabilities to provide information about the congress and city of Valencia, guiding people through the premises of the Events Center of Feria de Valencia and also being used as a “bell boy” announcing the next conference.

REEM also participated with a great success on Nov 11st talk “The future of doing business” with BBC’s presenter Spencer Kelly. They had an interesting conversation about the future of the technology and robotics

REEM was very well received by the participants, who were happily surprised to find such a remarkable HiTech-product at the Congress. And both UFI and its members are already looking forward to meet REEM again for the next year’s Annual Congress at ADNEC in Abu Dhabi.

This year the Humanoids Conference took place in Bled-Slovenia from October 26-28! REEM could not be missed at the event this year! The team of PAL Robotics hosted a Workshop on Humanoid navigation in crowded environments together with the IRI institute of Robotics of the Universitat de Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC). During the workshop, a paper was presented, showing the main challenges humanoid robots have to face in terms of navigation, when moving in environments crowded of people…. For instance, places like shopping malls, exhibition centers, airports, etc. Additionally, PAL Robotics showed a life demonstration of REEM’s navigation abilities. The workshop was a big success!

VIDEO: REEM at Golf Hotel – Bled Slovenia

During the rest of the conference, REEM introduced itself to the rest of the participants of the event. And showed other capabilities such as handshaking, tele-presence and guidance through the hotel where the conference was hosted. The attendants of the event, mostly people related to the scientific community, were delighted to meet REEM in real life and were amazed with its skills!

We are proud to announce the release of two software packages under open licenses. On the one hand, we are making available the virtual model of our humanoid service robot REEM, so you can test your algorithms on REEM, in the context of a simulated environment. On the other hand, we are making available a motion retargeting package that allows to perform unilateral teleoperation of REEM from live motion capture data. The latter was developed by our intern Marcus Liebhardt, in the context of his M.Sc. diploma.

Our work is built on top of existing open-source robotics projects, such as ROS and Orocos. These projects have helped us a great deal and we are grateful to them. It is our desire to contribute back to the community and continue to be an active part of it in the future.

For more information, please visit www.pal-robotics.com/software.

Further developments of these packages are already in preparation, so stay tuned for more!

This year at the SITGES International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, Eva was the opening movie of the event! The film is a Catalan production from Escándalo Films, directed by Kike Maillo. The movie is about a renowed cybernetic engineer that needs to carry out a very specific mission for the Robotic Faculty: the creation of a child robot.

Besides the movie being about robots and robotics, PAL Robotics has another reason to share a special bond with the production…. And that is because our robot REEM-B participated in the shooting of the movie! It was such a pleasure to spend a day with the team!

Originating from this participation, two robots of PAL Robotics were exhibited at the entrance of the auditorium of the Melià Hotel in Sitges, the hotel where all the big premieres of the event take place.

Our Business Development Manager Jan Jonckheere, who happens to live in Sitges, stopped by the Festival several times to check out the atmosphere at the event.

Jan says: “I am going to the Festival every year, because I love the atmosphere it creates in town. And although I can not call myself a fan of fantastic movies, the program really includes very interesting pictures, some of which you will never be able to see in the commercial circuit. Mix that with the usual movie stars that show up to promote their movies, people dressed up like zombies and other fantastic creatures, special “fantastic” menus at the restaurants, and you have one and a half week of ambiance guaranteed. And since I work in the robotics business, it gets an extra special flavor”.

Most impressive movie of this year?? Contagion from Steven Soderbergh: “The couple of days after seeing the movie, you really think twice before shaking hands with people”

11th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots

Workshop on humanoid service robot navigation in crowded and dynamic environments

During the Humanoids 2011 conference in Bled Slovenia, PAL Robotics is organizing a full day workshop! A great opportunity to meet PAL’s navigation team!

Date: October 26th, 2011 Bled, Slovenia

General Scope

Humanoid service robotics is a challenging robotics application where the frontier of science meets that of technology. Safe navigation is a core skill these robots must meet in order to be able to deploy these technologies to the mass market. Recent advances in humanoid robot navigation, either wheeled or legged, have shown successful navigation in moderately complex environments. However, safe, reliable, long-term, robust navigation is still an open challenge to robotics scientists.

This workshop will discuss innovative solutions and show state of the art results that address the problem of humanoid robot navigation in dynamic and crowded human-like environments such as, office spaces, homes, shopping malls, etc. Some of the difficulties in solving this problem include safe obstacle avoidance in 3D, robust localization in dynamic environments, people-aware motion planning, and situation awareness; all of them guaranteeing systems integrity as well as human safety.

Main Topics

• Localization in real environments (highly dynamic and crowded)
• Gait and step planning
• Full body motion planning in crowded environments
• 3D collision avoidance
• Human-aware navigation
• Human-robot emphatic behaviours
• Semantic navigation
• Environment perception

Preliminary Program

Opening ceremony (morning)
Chairman: Ricardo Tellez from PAL Robotics

Session I (morning): Invited speakers
Chairman: Juan Andrade-Cetto

Talks to be confirmed

Session II (afternoon): REEM demonstration
Chairman: Luca Marchionni

REEM will perform a demonstration of its navigation abilities in crowded environments.

Organizers

Luca Marchionni
PAL Robotics,
+34 934 145 347
luca.marchionni@pal-robotics.com

Ricardo Téllez
PAL Robotics,
+34 934 145 347
ricardo.tellez@pal-robotics.com

Juan Andrade-Cetto
Institut de Robotica i Informatica Industrial
CSIC-UPC
+34 934010775
cetto@iri.upc.edu

Prospective Speakers

• Sebastien Lengagne (confirmed)
• Oliver Stasse (confirmed)
• Nikolaos Tsagarakis (confirmed)
• Kenji Hashimoto (confirmed)
• Ricardo Tellez (confirmed)
• Maren Bennewitz (confirmed)
• James Kuffner
• Oussama Khatib
• Kazuhito Yokoi

Hi there!

More than 8 months I spent working together with the people and robots at PAL Robotics. During that time I worked on my robot teleoperation project, which also laid the foundations for my master thesis.

In my project I used Microsoft’s Kinect to capture the operator’s motion, which is then mapped onto the robot to yield a similar motion of both. For this teleoperation system I used several existing solutions, such as open-source software like ROS and Orocos. In my work I focused on bringing all necessary parts together and developing the missing pieces. The main missing piece was about how to map the motion between the significantly different kinematic structures of the operator and robot. This mapping is known as “motion retargeting”, what also was the focus of my master thesis.

(Soon you can see a video about my project, here on this blog.)

Working at PAL Robotics was great. I got a lot of help and inspiration from my supervisors and people all over the company. I enjoyed being part of the staff and to contribute to the strong team-work. My friendly colleagues also gave me insights into other fields of robotics, and last but not least, it was really fun working with them!

With finishing my master thesis and my studies, my internship at PAL is over… At the end of August I start working for a robotics company in Korea!

Guys, thanks a lot for the great time with you in Barcelona!

Regards,

Marcus